“Should you go alone?” Karl Ruge asked me. He wore a dark suit coat that made his white attachable collar look all the whiter. He folded back a shock of silver hair with his hands as he talked. During all the rains and time of mud, Karl had always looked tidy, and he’d done his own wash, never asking any of the women to do it for him. “Maybe you should wait until Christian comes back. This would be better, by golly?”
“I need to find out about oyster farming. A dollar apiece. Think of that.”
“For fresh ones, ja, shipped across the Bay and into the ocean. But most go for a penny, boiled on the streets of mining towns, or so I’m told. It is not a gold strike, Emma Giesy. This is not an easy thing you think of.”
“It’s farming. We know how to do that,” I said. “We know about planting and tending and praying over the harvest.”
“The oysters must be planted and grown,” Karl said. “That means more investment. And learning how to replant, to not overharvest. Investments in ships to send them south. One still needs to find a way to live while the oystermen wait. All that will cost money, Emma.”
“But if we were successful, we could pay off what the land has cost us and even contribute to the new colony when Wilhelm decides where that will be. We can still be a part of it but … separate.” Oyster farming would make us unique, but I knew that was a word that also meant “extraordinary,” a concept perhaps too close to “prideful” for Karl Ruge’s simple ways.
“It is still not good that you travel by yourself. Your in-laws would not approve.”
Karl was right about that. Barbara and Andreas, Christian’s parents, had raised their eyebrows at me on more than one occasion since Christian left with Wilhelm: when I spoke up in a gathering, when I went alone to see Sarah, when I acted like myself.
“Do you have a reason to go to Bruceport?” I asked Karl.
He rubbed his white chin hair. “The post office there is where Wilhelm said for mail to come from Bethel. There and Portland. I should see if he’s sent us word of where we are to find him or if there are letters from Bethel that need answering.”
Karl hadn’t gone with Wilhelm. I was curious about that, though it was none of my affair. He’d begun teaching the children of those who had decided to wait until Keil actually found a new place rather than adjust once again for a few weeks or months and then move to the more permanent site. Maybe Karl felt useful here.
The weather turned balmy, as it usually did in April, and with men able to hunt now, the cries of hungry children no longer pushed at us. Karl instructed out under the trees, using sticks and hard red berries to teach math and the beauty of the landscape to teach English. He said it was the finest schoolhouse he’d ever taught in.
Being in the Willapa Valley may not have been luxurious, but it was familiar, and with the rain ceasing it was gloriously pleasant. Perhaps Karl, too, wanted to move only once more and would take in the bounty of this place before choosing something else.
“Ja, by golly. I have reason to go to Bruceport,” he said finally. “To get the mail.”
“Christian might have sent me a letter. His parents would understand my wish to go there with Sam Woodard and be unconcerned if you came too, Karl. We’ll do this together.”
The Willapa ran full and wide, but I could see both shorelines, a comfort to me. I took deep breaths and made myself exhale so as not to get dizzy. Sam Woodard and Karl handled the oars and the sails. I could hang on tight to my son and daughter. Oystering would mean more time on water, more time in water, I realized. I’d need to have the children stay with their grandparents so I could help with the harvest, or maybe we’d need to move closer to the oyster beds so I could learn to open the shells or prepare them for shipping. Closer to the water? In Bruceport, I was told, the tide came in under the boardwalks. What could be closer than that? There’d be water everywhere, seagulls chattering to us every day, and not just Charlie appearing every now and then for scraps.
I took a deep breath. If this would be a way to bring my husband’s confidence back, then overcoming my fear of water would be worth it. Show me the path. Show me the path.
Long-handled rakes leaned against log sheds as we eased closer toward the bay. Low flat boats, skiffs Sam called them, piled high with oyster shells, moved across the water toward the open sea and a large ship waiting there. Near a cluster of buildings, native women bent over piles of shells, sifting and sorting, their scarves tight around their heads. They stood and stared as we slipped by. I waved. They didn’t wave back. Where the tide had gone out, beyond the buildings, I watched more native women stand in the low tidewater beside their baskets. They looked as though they walked on water, the mud slithered with a film that reflected them as they worked. Stacks of discarded oyster shells pocked the shoreline like a chain of small white mountains.
We anchored our boat, and carrying Andy, Sam splashed toward shore. I lifted my skirts and followed. I asked Sam if he could recommend an oysterman that I might talk with.
“You didn’t come to get the mail?” he said.
“That, too, but I also want to talk oysters.” I sat to put my shoes back on.
“Lots of folks do,” he said. “They’ll be nearing the end of their harvest soon. Never eat an oyster in a month that doesn’t have an r in it,” he advised. He scanned the wooden fronts of oystering warehouses. “I’d try that last place there, not far from the mouth. Supposed to be an American from San Francisco. He might answer your questions.”
“Joe Knight! You’re here? You’ve been here all along?”
“Not all the time,” he said sheepishly. “Now let me answer your questions. They’re middens, those discarded shells,” he told Andy, who pointed at the piles of nubby shells. “Middens are what’s left after we cull the good ones and then take out the meat to dry. The Indians do it that way mostly, drying the meat for use later. We like them fresh, of course. Earn more money that way.” He pointed with that finger in the air and winked. He lived in a small log house set with a walkway to the beach, and he had opened his arms wide to Karl Ruge when we found him. To me he tipped his hat, shook Andy’s little hand, and smiled at Catherina. It wasn’t until I heard his German-accented English and saw that finger pointing that I knew for sure who he was.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“This time? About six months.”
“You never went back to Bethel,” I said. I bounced the baby on my hip. “You left the Willapa River but never returned. People wonder where you are. You need to let your brother know you’re all right.”
“I started to,” he said. “But the two of us split after we worked on a bridge.” His blond hair poked out from under his narrow-brimmed hat. He had a tiny mustache but no beard now at all. He still poked with his fingers when he talked. “I went to San Francisco and then came back. This was as far as I got.”
“But why didn’t you let us know? Why not return to help us?”
“Ja,” he said, looking down. “I wasn’t sure colonists would understand my journeying into San Francisco. Then once the weather changed and I decided to come back, I thought maybe oystering would be a good thing for me, better than chopping trees so tall you can’t see their tops without lying flat on your back. I was going to help you build through the winter. But I stopped here.” His face colored. “I’d worked in California, so I had a little money and invested in an oyster claim. Right here,” he said, waving his arm. Apparently, right at the mouth of the Willapa River lay a natural bed of oysters. “It has everything I need. Even people to show me how to do it. The Indians, mostly.”
“You had no scares of massacres?” I asked.
He shook his head. “They might have been scared at what a bad oysterman I was. The women laughed at a man gathering oysters at first, but I notice lots of white men do it. We float along in the skiffs dragging our tongs until we stumble onto something that feels right. Then we grab with those tongs and, hand over hand, pull up whatever we’ve caught onto: rocks and b
roken shells and mud and clusters of oysters. We sort through it until we find just what we’re looking for. The pearl, the best oysters. We dry or ship the rest for boiling, then discard the shells.”
“The pearls here are not as large or perfect, I hear,” Karl Ruge said.
Joe nodded agreement. “Perfection isn’t my aim. Never was. Living full, that’s what I wanted. I still share,” he said. He sounded defensive just a bit. “I give back. Don’t have to belong to a colony to do that.”
Karl nodded.
“The Indian women say we should put the shells back into the water,” Joe said, returning to a safer subject. “As a protected place for the young oysters to grow up in. No one else does it, though. It’s hard work but I like it.”
I wondered what he’d say when I proposed he needed a partner.
On the boat ride back, my mind raced with possibilities. Here, Christian could find meaning and good work; here, he could perhaps forgive himself for being human, for doing the best he could, though all hadn’t turned out as he’d once hoped. But how to convince him that such a move could be a statement of faith?
“You are in deep thought, Frau Giesy,” Karl said.
I nodded. “I want to find a way to help my husband see oystering as a buttress to his faith. And I want to be sure I’m not making my own religion up, as I sometimes think Herr Keil has, while I wrangle with how we should be in this western place.”
“There is an old Norse word for religion that translates in the English as ‘tying again,’ ” he said. He gazed out across the water, the silence broken only by the swish of the boat cutting through the water. “Somehow I think those Norsemen must have realized that life unravels us at times. It is the way of things. It is our faith, our religion, I believe, that then binds us together.”
“ ‘Begin to weave / God provides the thread,’ ” I said. “My mother gave that German proverb to me.” It came to me then what that proverb meant: that life is a weaving with our fine threads being broken and stretched. It’s our calling to keep weaving, find ways to tie things together again.
30
A Pearl Unique
“The band played in Portland,” Christian said. “March 22, 1856, our first performance in all these years.”
“You played?”
He shook his head no, his enthusiasm apparently coming from the association with the players, not anything he did himself. “Jonathan played.”
“You saw my brother? Is he well?” I clutched at his arm. “I wish he’d come back with you.”
“He seemed content to be with the band and those who wintered in Portland. They played at the request of someone named Grimm, the same one who told Wilhelm about the apples. He sold us 256 bushels of oats at forty cents a bushel and 165 bushels of wheat at seventy cents each. They can begin grinding flour, and best of all, I’ve brought apples and more flour to tide us over until we leave. They’ll take the grain to Aurora Mills; that’s what Wilhelm calls the land they purchased. He’s named it for Aurora.”
Not for Louisa, I thought.
“It’s a rolling piece of prairie south of Portland. Many acres. It already has a gristmill on it. Their neighbors are from French Prairie, named for all the retired Frenchies of Hudson’s Bay and their Indian wives.”
“So we can keep the grist stones your parents brought here, then.”
Christian looked puzzled. “We won’t be here, so why would we leave them?” He looked around. “In fact, I wonder why they’ve wasted time plowing up the soil and planting oats here.”
“Have they already begun to build Wilhelm’s gross Haus at Aurora Mills?” I asked.
He looked away.
“I suspect Keil and company wait in Portland in a nice warm house where food is plenty and he can hold court—I mean preach—to many, while my brother and others like him build his house for him. My own brother who doesn’t even make a way to see me or his niece and nephew. Well, so be it.” I brushed at my apron, though I saw nothing there.
“You can see him when we join them in Oregon, Liebchen,” Christian said.
“I don’t plan to go to Oregon, Christian. And when I tell you what I’ve found and who agrees with me, you won’t want to leave here either.”
“Emma …”
We took our small boat to our claim, seven miles up the Willapa from Woodard’s Landing. I wanted a pleasant place to talk to Christian, and he was willing to take me to the site he’d once picked for us to build on. He was saying good-bye to the landscape, he said; I was beginning to say hello. We stood there now, overlooking the four logs we’d left last fall to outline the house. They’d been pushed and tossed in different directions. Maybe from stout winds. I hoped not from high water or flooding. Andy whined to be carried on his father’s shoulders, and he did, riding high while reaching for the leaves of trees. I held Catherina in my arms. We ate biscuits with butter, a luxury, then sat on a quilt my mother had sent in the trunk.
It was now or never. “The scouts were right, husband. The Willapa Valley will provide everything we need if we’re patient and are willing to accept not the perfect pearl but one that is distinctive.”
“Indeed.”
“Karl thinks that oystering can work,” I said, after telling him about Joe Knight and our trip to Bruceport. “He’s willing to remain here to make it happen and teach any children who stay here too.”
“Karl is? He’s so … loyal to Wilhelm. Always has been. And Joe.” He shook his head.
“It isn’t disloyal to follow your heart,” I said. “Karl didn’t go with Wilhelm to Portland because he believes there is something here worth staying for. Everything about it here, except the rainy winters, is an Eden. We’d appreciate the blooms and beauty less if we had nothing to contrast it with, and therein lies the joy of the rainy winter months, the dark heavy clouds that shadow our days and promise sunshine in due time. I never thought I’d say such a thing, but I mean it, Christian. I do.”
“Wilhelm is right, though. There is still no market here for whatever we might produce.”
“But you were right too. We’re on rivers and near oceans, so we can ship things to markets.” He shook his head, still not convinced. I tried another tactic. “It doesn’t mean that Wilhelm was wrong about this place. It just means others can listen and hear something else. Wilhelm has done that. He’s decided to go somewhere else. Neither of you made a mistake. Each is free to make other choices. We just have to make a change in what we thought we’d do. Less grain farming and more … oyster farming.”
“Emma, I—”
“At least until we get field crops established. We can cherish what we have, still be a part of the colony if you wish, but separated. Maybe the way Nineveh was back in Missouri.”
“Nineveh grew just a few miles down the road. We’ll be a hundred and thirty miles distant from Aurora Mills. It’ll make decision-making difficult.”
“Not if we’re really … separate.” Andy draped his arms around his father’s neck as the child stood behind him. “He missed you terribly,” I said, then continued. “We can pay off the land claims with what we sell. And maybe, just maybe, living communally isn’t what we were called to do. We can still be faithful to our beliefs even if we don’t have a common fund.”
Christian shook his head. “What beliefs are there except to follow Wilhelm’s way of serving? I have trouble seeing anything else.”
“But that’s it, Christian. Maybe, like Wilhelm, you too are visionary and you can see things differently if you can stop blaming yourself for what happened here. We don’t need to separate our hearts from the other colonists nor from our neighbors to be in service. We can look at what our neighbors might need. Your recruitment brought in good people like Karl Ruge, but most were people who just made the colony bigger and produced more work. It didn’t bring people in who had needs that we could meet. We tended one another, but isn’t giving to those truly hurting what service is all about?”
He dug at his ears. He was thinki
ng.
“Oystering, if we’re successful, would allow us to be good neighbors to the colonists and to those here.”
I decided to be still. My father said to sell a wagon, one needed to sing its virtues and then be quiet and listen to how the customer would then tell him why he needed that very wagon, how he had a big family and could use a sturdy vehicle, or how his wife was sickly and needed one that handled the ruts well. The rest would be simple.
Christian stayed silent a very long time. I’d probably strained my threads in trying to describe what I meant, in trying to tie things, again. He stayed quiet too long.
“We could share the costs and profits of those at Willapa, maybe send a percentage each year on to Aurora Mills. Tithe our harvest. But there won’t need to be one leader with all the weight of the success or failure on his shoulders. We can decide as a family what to do, or as a group of families. We don’t need to wait for just one ruler.”
A seagull, probably not Charlie, flew overhead with several others. “Bread, Papa. I want to throw him bread,” Andy said. I overlooked the fact that my son asked his father and not me for bread and handed a biscuit to Christian who gave it to Andy. The child threw up breadcrumbs and squealed in delight when a bird swooped down to catch a crumb in midair.
“Even the seagulls adapt to new opportunities,” I said. “You know Wilhelm will never let another lead while he’s alive, and he won’t prepare another to take his place. So we should listen to our hearts, listen to what we think we’re hearing and follow that.”
Christian played with a long strand of grass, running it through his wide fingers. He watched Andy’s interest in the root of a cedar tree. Catherina had decided to nap.
“We came to serve people, Liebchen. Wilhelm was right about that. This place has no people to recruit or bring into the fold, none to help prepare for the last days ahead.”
“We don’t bring them in, God brings them. Didn’t you tell me this once? And we don’t have to be so separated from our neighbors. Look at all those oystermen. Look at Joe. I think he feels a bit guilty for having left us. If we join him, you could help relieve that. There are dozens of people suffering in silence. We might hear them if we weren’t listening to the chop of trees building the colony for the sake of … the colony. We can’t just worry about our little group, Christian. How else can we be salt and light?”